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Family Day at the museum

Addison Wagner, 3, of Pembroke tries her hand at assembling a miniature log cabin while visiting the Champlain Trail Museum and Heritage Village on Monday. For the first time, the museum opened for the Family Day holiday, and drew large crowds.

On Monday, the Champlain Trail Museum and Heritage Village opened its doors on Family Day for the first time, welcoming visitors to check them out.

Angela Siebarth, museum curator, said it has been a great turnout, with more than 30 people visiting within the first few hours of them opening. She said they had scavenger hunts, where kids went around the museum looking for artifacts, opportunities to make candles the old fashioned way, and to construct miniature log cabins using Lincoln logs.

There was also the opportunity to watch a slide show highlighting the numerous historic buildings which stand in downtown Pembroke.

“I'm pleased with the turn out,”she said, noting Feb. 15 is the official start of Heritage Week in Ontario. “This is a good way to promote heritage and the importance of preserving it.”

The Family Day event dovetailed nicely into the successful heritage event held Friday and Saturday at the Pembroke Mall. There, several organizations such as the museum partnered with the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 72 Museum, 42nd Field Regimental Museum (Lanark and Renfrew Scottish), the Calvin United Church Archives, Murray L. Moore Hydro Museum and the Upper Ottawa Valley Genealogical Group to present displays and such to celebrate our common history.

Their event has been held at Calvin United Church, but was relocated this year to see if they could attract more visitors.

Siebarth said she estimates 150 or so people came by to visit them during their time there, including some new faces, so she would like them to be able to return to the mall next year, if they can. She said people were pretty interested in the 1907 map on display showing part of the proposed Georgian Bay Ship Canal, a project that could have been on the scale of the Panama Canal. Pembroke and the Ottawa River would have been incorporated into the system which would have allowed Great Lake freighters to travel directly from Lake Huron to Montreal, had it gone ahead.

Siebarth said people were also interested in the spinning demonstrations.